George Romney Dies at 88; A Leading G.O.P. Figure

By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM

Published: July 27, 1995

George W. Romney, an automobile executive who became a three-term Governor of Michigan, a Republican Presidential candidate and a member of the Nixon Cabinet, died yesterday at his home in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., a Detroit suburb. He was 88.

His wife, Lenore, whom he married in 1931, found him collapsed yesterday morning on the treadmill in the exercise room of their home, their son G. Scott Romney said. The office of the Oakland County Medical Examiner issued a statement saying only that Mr. Romney had died of natural causes.

Mr. Romney was chairman and president of the American Motors Corporation when he resigned in 1962 to run, successfully, for Governor. He ran for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1968 but dropped out of the race just before the New Hampshire primary. He then served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in President Richard M. Nixon's first term.

Mr. Romney represented the liberal wing of the Republican Party, supporting civil rights initiatives and Government social programs and opposing the war in Vietnam. His politics proved successful in Michigan, where he was elected Governor three times, by increasingly large margins.

But as a politician on the national stage, he seemed wooden. He was ridiculed because of a remark in 1967 that he had originally supported the war in Vietnam because he had been "brainwashed" by generals and diplomats during a visit there in 1965. As Housing Secretary, he was outside President Nixon's inner circle and was relegated to pleading in vain for an expansion of urban and other domestic programs.

Mr. Romney resigned after Mr. Nixon was re-elected in 1972 and essentially retired from public life. But he re-emerged last year to campaign actively for his other son, Mitt, who ran for the Senate in Massachusetts and lost to the incumbent, Edward M. Kennedy.

George Wilcken Romney was born in 1907 in a Mormon colony in Chihuahua, Mexico. His parents were American citizens and monogamists, but they had moved to Mexico along with many other Mormons when Congress outlawed polygamy in the 1880's.

His parents moved back to the United States when he was a child, and he was reared in Idaho and Utah. He served two years as a Mormon missionary in England and Scotland. He also attended several colleges but never graduated.

As a young man, Mr. Romney worked in Washington as a speechwriter for a Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, David T. Walsh. He then became a Washington lobbyist for the aluminum industry and an official of the Automobile Manufacturers Association.

In 1948, he joined the Nash-Kelvinator Corporation. Six years later, Nash-Kelvinator merged with the Hudson Motor Car Company to create American Motors, and Mr. Romney became president of the company. He managed to rescue American Motors from near collapse with a successful promotion of the company's Rambler as a midget mightier than Detroit's "gas-guzzling dinosaurs."

He also became engaged in civic affairs, heading a citizens' committee for Detroit's schools and organizing a political group, Citizens for Michigan, to study Detroit's problems.

In 1962, after weeks of agonizing and a 24-hour prayerful fast, Mr. Romney resigned from American Motors to run for Governor against the Democratic incumbent, John B. Swainson. With an appeal to labor unions unusual for a Republican, Mr. Romney won by 78,000 votes and became the first Republican Governor of Michigan in 14 years.

He was re-elected in 1964 and 1966. In 1967, he became the first announced candidate for the 1968 Republican Presidential nomination.

In the early campaigning in New Hampshire, Mr. Romney was a front-runner. But as the weeks went by, he was increasingly dogged by his remark about having been brainwashed. The perception grew, fairly or not, that he was a witless candidate with his foot in his mouth.

Mr. Romney always maintained that his real problem had been that there was not room for both him and Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York as candidates to the left of Mr. Nixon. But Mr. Rockefeller did not enter the race in earnest until the Romney candidacy had faltered.

As Housing Secretary, Mr. Romney tried to expand public housing and move some of it into the suburbs. He did increase somewhat the amount of federally subsidized housing, but others in the Administration blocked his efforts to place it in suburbs.

In retirement, Mr. Romney remained physically active, walking several miles a day and playing golf.

In addition to his wife and two sons, he is survived by two daughters, Lynn Keenan and Jane Romney; 23 grandchildren, and 33 great-grandchildren.

Photo: At a meeting of governors in October 1967, George Romney, center, chatted with two other leading Republicans: Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, left, and Ronald Reagan of California. (Associated Press)